Home

Trans As Indictor Species, 2021
Klaus Gallery
I Contain Multitudes
January 15 – February 20, 2021

Trans As Indicator Species, 2021

Copper Sheet, Tactile Transducers, Amp, Sound of Artist’s Heartbeat, Metal Truss, Infrared Lights, Video Projector, Video of Microscopic Materials Ingested by Artist, Wooden Box,  Ice-Encased T-Shirts filled with sweat by the Artist, Devynn Emory, Georgia Peaches, Pete Oyler, Kieran Myles Andrés Tverbakk, and Toni Carlson. 

An indicator species is an organism, through its particular set of sensitivities, measures disturbances in ecosystems. Studying the proliferation, reduction, mutations, or adaptations of these organisms helps to assess the general “health” of the system and the symbiotic relationships thus within. Measuring these individuals can indicate a change in the balance normally maintained within an ecosystem, and often points to larger shifts in surrounding forces.

There is no social system more rigid, perhaps, than that of being born into a binary-based gender system. When trans people reject the external imperative of birth sex, and undergo biological, spiritual, and social transformations, our bodies are the site for an interdependent ecological upheaval. We are physically transforming our internal biologies while simultaneously pointing to, and changing the social, political, and often familial structures through which these bodies were shaped. Trans people, as well as people inhabiting other bodies which are stamped by social, political, and economic systems, are often the first to be harmed by the chemistry of the normative force fields, and also those whose very existence signals another potential stew. 

The biome of the internal becomes the biome of the external. And the skin, or membrane through which this transformation occurs, is the most dynamic place for energy transfer, sound, heat, politics, debate, and catharsis. Through the skin we communicate our internal biome as sweat, as breath, as our inner molecules become atmosphere. The smallest most intimate parts of ourselves–hormones, pheromones, bacterias, chemicals–diffuse through our skin and commingle with the outside air. Like a virus, we spread ourselves, our beliefs, our chemistry evaporating into the weather of our social systems. 

In this piece, Trans as Indicator Species, I am creating an evaporation resonating system with a large sheet of copper skin. Included in this system is a projection of video of microscopic images of hormones, vitamins and foods ingested, overlaid with the image of my belly, sweaty t-shirt of friends-who-identify-with-the-word trans encased in ice melting on the metal sheet, infrared lights causing the evaporation of the sweat inside the gallery, and stereo transducers resonating the copper sheet with audio of spoken text and sonic evaporation.

From January 18th-29th, Jules Gimbrone will be in residence at Helena Anrather Gallery researching illusion as conceptual and physical material. Gimbrone will interview people in non-art fields on how the concept of illusion functions in their work. They have a specific interest in talking with people in fields in which quantitative analysis is essential, but are open to all fields. This research will lead to a new body of work.

If you are interested in having a brief, relaxed, and exploratory conversation with Gimbrone, please sign up here.

More from Gimbrone:

I am interested in illusion as a queer strategy for evoking ecstatic confusion. There is an overt queerness to illusion–an act of deception–which negates a simple read of the real. We ask questions, rather than state facts, and resonate as unstable subjects in a system that is held together by a collective solidifying of belief.

In my work I emphasize the presence of diverse sensory textures that play with mis-understanding through sonic and visual illusions. I set up these disruptions between the senses in order to re-wire our habitual response to sensory input, a state of being that I correlate to transgender perception. I work to evoke a disorientation which may act as a re-set to enable the perception of contingent systems rather than absolute truths.